Death of the Cool

Back when I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be cool. I endlessly played my Miles Davis Birth of the Cool LP and devoured Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — not to mention Kerouac whom I saw when I was fifteen reading from The Subterraneansat Hunter College auditorium while swigging from a bottle of Scotch he had brought with him. (I thought that was cool.)

Being cool was everything to me then. And to most of my friends. We started as boy beatniks and morphed into hippies (of sorts) as the times rolled and then turned into yuppies, going upscale, but the values were the same. Many of us pretended to be Marxists, but at heart we knew we were liberals, just like mom and dad. Or most of our moms and dads.

But whatever our politics, play or otherwise, we were big time cultural rebels. Thought we were anyway. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

All of that is so over. Just as it reached its apogee, with Stevie Wonder boogieing in the White House and the values of the Sixties spread through the upper echelons of our government, filled with more czars than the Hermitage ever dreamed of with a president who palled around with Bill Ayers, for crissakes, cool is now dead.

Maybe not officially dead (how could that be?) but dead enough. In fact, not only is it dead, it’s decomposed.

Cool depended on liberalism. In fact, it was an offshoot of it, suckling on the mother’s milk of Keynesian economics. As long as there was plenty of deficit spending to go around, we could all be cool. Life would be one long evening at Max’s Kansas City.

Of course, it’s not. In today’s pay-as-you-go world, being cool is a luxury few can afford. This accounts for the extreme discomfort we may be seeing in our media and, to a lesser extent — they still have more money — Hollywood. Our media, our journos, depend on being thought cool and, consequently and perhaps more importantly, thinking of themselves as cool. When they suspect they are not, they begin to behave like worker bees when the queen is killed. They tend to run around and act out. After a while, they seem lost. Their numbers dwindle.

This is just because cool depended on a hive mind in the first place. It was little more than fad. We are well rid of it.

And in part because cool is gone, the remaining liberals are the new reactionaries. They are the ones trapped in the past, the enemies of the future.

Not that there are so many liberals anymore, outside the media. I spotted a new Prius today in a tony L.A. neighborhood sporting a pristine “Romney in 2012″ bumper sticker. Such a thing would have been incongruous, maybe even unheard of, four years ago. But cool is dead. You’re free to do what you want.

And make no mistake about it — cool was oppressive. It told you how to be and what to be. In some ways cool was the inverse of itself. It was the enemy of freedom while pretending to be its apostle. Nowadays there is nothing more square than to be cool. So feel free to be whatever you want to be.

You may even be cool again. In a new way.

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1.
bluemount

Roger, I too was a teen in the “sixties”. Those who thought they were cool were not. Main stream teens then were not hippies or liberals or anti-war but the MSM made it seem that way. Very few were what you said. It was also not a “sexual revolution” for most of us either. None of that “free love” or ” Summer of Love”. It was all mostly hype by MSM looking for a story.

I don’t think that the 60s harbored closet liberals, but rather reactionaries of the stripe of Tom Wolfe and other New Journalists. I wrote about their primitivism here: http://clarespark.com/2011/02/11/undoing-multiculturalism/.
As for Roger Simon’s column, I hope he is right about the new cool.

Whoops! I put up the wrong link. Here is what I meant to show you: http://clarespark.com/2011/09/08/getting-down-with-tom-wolfe/. There is some connection with multiculturalism, because the boundaries that Wolfe erects between him and his lower-class specimens are common to both multiculturalism and to his brand of New Journalism.

I have to confess, I was so terminally uncool I never even tried really to follow the mold. Served me poorly most of my life, doesn’t really do much for me these days…but it did at least spare me the pressures of trying to fit in with that crowd…always was grateful for that, if nothing else.

You and I may represent a tiny minority. I was sorry to read this column because it diminished my respect for the writer. Some of us are born with minds that have perspective and that makes us aware from the very outset that the group mentality is always wrong. If that stalls our progress in the world, so be it, but we can shave in the morning and find a face in the mirror that we respect.

Yeah, me too…which is why I could defend the Serbs against their pro-jihadi attackers when that wasn’t cool (still isn’t, by the way), and which is why I became a counterjihad blogger long before that was cool!

People are finally discovering that it’s hip to be square. That’s why conservatism is on the rise. They tried cool, and all they got was a social disease called liberalism. Time for a drastic change and conservatism is it.

To be anti-establishment now is to be conservative.
I read an article about the waning days of the NY-9 race, and what caught my eye was the reporter’s passing mention of the young & enthusiastic people at work in Bob Turner’s office. The MSM analysis about how that district was lost to the republicans was that it was due to the Orthodox Jewish vote and a few disaffected Blue Dog dems- but this is their worst nightmare. They’re losing the youth vote, and can’t even say it out loud.

Cool happened in the 1950′s, by the late 60′s it was already long dead and buried. Mass movements of individualism are awkward by definition, and usually indicate a period of decadence, not innovation. Oddly, most of the artistic achievements often touted by the 1960′s actually happened in the 1950′s and predate the hippie movement, as does Miles Davis’s seminal recording in the title above (recorded in 1449-50, it still remains a great contribution to American music; I listen to it regularly with great delight). Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Lee Konitz were all participants (and arrangers) and all were predate the 1960′s. You could make a very strong case that the 50′s and very early 1960′s were a much more influential and durable artistic era than the late sixties and early 1970′s in virtually every category, except perhaps pornography.

That’s why he looked so strange-looking later in life, he was actually over 500 years old (and obviously a vampire). And, yes, according to Lewis Farrakhan, Africans invented recording technology; Miles Davis was at the forefront of that innovation in the 15th Century. Little known facts.

Man, you are sounding so uncool
Cool always was about doing your own thing in the way you found best. The real cool was the individual awareness, not any group.
Doing the cool fashionable thing was the uncool trying to pretend to be cool, and is what messed it all up.
But there was a contrary current to the silly self.

I wrote this UK perspective about 20 years ago:

At first the hippies were welcomed, almost loved by Londoners – they appreciated folk that wanted the world to be a happier place.
The situation remained ambivalent through the 1960s with the `common man’ unsure of what, exactly, these kids stood for. They wore pretty clothes. Cannabis didn’t seem such a bad thing. They chanted about love so convincingly that even policemen wore sheepish grins as they patrolled the mass get-togethers.
Then came Manson.
In one day love turned to hate. A whole new ball game. `The hippies revealed’. Satan moved in.
It had been a long happy summer. Idle moments in Holland Park as jets went overhead to Heathrow. Intricate pathways through the trees. The gentle scent of forest in the city. Pathways covered with leaves. Dogs gambolled in the evening light. The silence of trees echoing with voices of children at play. Generous gestures and easy acceptance. Even harsh, drab Notting Hill Gate took on colour. Portobello Road was fun. The massive music boxes could play an entire concerto of sound – he loved sound.
Paris was just hours away.
Old prejudices prevailed. In fact the hippie `ethos’ only filtered through long, long after its possibility had dwindled to saleable dreams marketed by competent businessmen.
Utopia is not yet accessible. At least the old standards provided a degree of freedom – enough for the hippies to be born. Love, when legislated, becomes hate – totalitarian.
The hippies were somehow a magnificent phenomenon that everyone ignored until 10, 20 years after, when they recalled the `glorious summer of ’67′. An ethos was stillborn. No. It lived a few months.
There was media-hype with the Beatles and a new craze of the sixties, but, in fact, the media were out of touch, and the whole movement for love and innocence endured a reprieve from interpretation – manipulation. Main media didn’t touch it. It was beyond understanding.
Okay – there were beggars asking for money on the steps of psychedelic nightclubs but the essence was a drive for love – to make something beautiful, exciting and real, work. This, after a generation of cocky ego hate-mania.
The Teds. The Mods. The Rockers. Whatever. Ego.
But the hate mania returned. The emphasis slipped back from a search for delight – an essentially disciplined task – to the ease of ego. Ego is straightforward if that is the way you are built.
The hippie time was based on a totally contrary current. Ego was Out. Love was in. Who cares? Who can even remember except a few who did not die? LSD was a bastard. A revealer – a betrayer.
No-one will adequately record the euphoria of the hippie time. It is something that came and went and is beyond realistic recall.
How, in a world based on survival, did it ever come about? Perhaps it was a KGB plot? If it was then the KGB understood something worth keeping.
Truth is gentle – the easiest thing to obfuscate.

I am reminded of one of my first trips to Tokyo back in the late 80’s. I was walking through the Harajuku section of Tokyo where all the young people were hanging out. Everybody was sporting punk-style haircuts and crazy clothes that were all black and white. I asked my Japanese friend why everybody was wearing black and white clothing, and she told me that was to show everyone how “Cool” they were. It was known as the “Individual” look. Just imagine thousands of young people all crushed into this small district in Tokyo, all dressed alike, and calling it the “individual” look. That is the perfect definition of “Cool”.

“Cool” is basically ennui made into a model for conformists. It relieves its adherents of the need to ask themselves, “Am I really enjoying this crap?” “Relieves” is exactly the right word, for many of the self-consciously “cool” would fear the answer.

I just read “Diet of Treacle” by Lawrence Block set in the Village in the early sixties. This books shows that cool is highly comformist just not productive, and that it requires subsidies from somewhere else (in this case drug dealing).

I have nothing against real hippies. They just want to live and be left alone. The fakers are the ones that pretend to live the lifestyle simply to gain some kind of moral authority, and then proceed to attempt to cram it down our throats. How do you tell the difference? Real hippies aren’t employed by corporations. They live off the grid. The IRS doesn’t know that they exist.

It isn’t difficult. An ex-girlfriend of mine is living such a life. She picks mushrooms – pine cones – makes Xmas wreaths and other hand-crafted stuff made from driftwood and other natural stuff found by her. She’s been doing this for almost 40 years now and makes enough to live on – it feeds her – the pets and 2 horses.

No power – refrigerator is a propane unit (gotta have cold beer) and an outdoor toilet. She is the same age as me (64) and will get nearly nothing from SS when she retires since she’s probably worked no more than 5 years total in all her life. Retirement is something she says she probably won’t do since she likes what she does. Imagine that – a national forest behind her and a horse to take you to where you need to go to get the materials for your crafts.

She built her home with help from her son. She lacks a few conveniences you and I take for granted like tv whenever – microwave oven etc. Her home is well built and weather tight – heated with wood – and has a gorgeous view of the nearby river. She has a well that is powered by a small generator from which she pumps water up into a 500 gallon holding tank that is pressurized with a small compressor to enable running water – heated by propane. She does admit to running the generator to watch tv on occasion when the small bank of batteries give out. The batteries charge during water pumping give her 5-7 hours of tv from a small 12v one – before they get low. She’s considering solar cells or a windmill generator to charge the batteries or get more. Batteries cost so thats on hold. Trouble is she has large trees all round so a windmill is probably not going to work very well. She has considered a water powered generator but thinks the County would frown on it. She has a small drain-field for the ‘gray-water’ coming from the sink and shower. Cooking is done by wood stove or propane depending on weather.

She has a very large garden and grows quite a bit of the vegetables she needs for a year. Canning seems to be second nature to her.

All in all its a pretty idyllic way to live if you like that sort of thing. It is hard work but it fits her like a glove.

K.T.;
You oughta look into the SS benefits, if you haven’t already. There must be some documents showing the income from the “business”. There may be enough documentation to get benefits for the 5 years, which is better than zip.

If the goal was not to be “off the grid” and to support herself through her own labor, it is also possible that her income might technically place her below the poverty line and make her eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from Social Security. Of course, it requires all kinds of interaction with the grid to get that.

Ah, “Commie Cool”, rage, rage against the dying of the fight. Does not go gently into that good night.

The “counter-culture cool” is a “special interest” group on a perpetual hunt for a grievance, something to rail against, someone to talk down to, someone to slur, …an angry, petulant, smug and pedantic roiling boil of near hysteria over imagined and exaggerated threats to the weak, the disaffected and any/all newly created “victim” class.

The interest nowadays is hardly very special, in fact, any interest will do. In a pitiable attempt to recapture the rush of adrenaline from the baby boomer’s youth…the protest culture’s last gasp of relevance.

Desperately clinging to the self-annointed role as the “conscience” of the world, on stage and ready for their close up, Mr. DeMille. A wrinkled, fading, dyspeptic generation, spoiled by a celebrity unearned and self-promoted. Fueled by self-congratulatory awards, trophy’s and prizes in rigged competitions where nobody else can win.

The Gravest Generation, dour, sour and perpetually seeking power. In a fit of pique they seized everything they could get their hands on…and left ruin in their wake.

Like a dog chasing a bus, in 2008 they caught it. And the whole damn sham came crumbling down on their heads. The protest culture thought they were the ones we had been waiting for. And now, the truth and reality is harsh.

No…we weren’t.

Cool just went cold. And rigid. Frozen in another time and place. Grave men, near death, will you see with blinding sight? It is time to lay down and not rage against the dying of the fight. Go gentle into that good night.

Nicely said, cfb. But we musn’t ignore the millions of deaths the 60s maggots brought us — 110 million alone estimated for the banning of DDT, not to mention tolerating communism — and the billions of lessened, if not totally wasted, lives.

Unfortunately, PC/MC live fat and happy everywhere. Don’t mistake faltering for failing.
We’re coming to the end of the 1930′s about now.
Your “gravest generation” will turn violent and happily induce their götterdämmerung before we’re done.

The “cool” people of the modern era are the progeny of the artist/intellectual class of 19th-Century Paris. These people defined themselves by their opposition to everything that already existed in their society. They were nothing in particular in themselves. They merely “observed” and criticized everyone and everything else. Their coolness was a mere posture of unearned superiority.

The so-called “counterculture” of 1950s and 1960s America adopted the same posture. Like Brando in “The Wild Ones,” who when asked what he was rebelling against answered, “Whaddya got?” The defining of oneself solely by asserting what one is not. Cool kids and elitists everywhere live by this rule. Developmental arrest in adolescence. Ridiculing Dad while living over his garage and mooching off his paycheck.

Cool was the adolescent herd mentality of being different from your parents but conforming to your peers. Unfortunately many in my generation (I am 56) never grew up as society began rewarding credentials over achievement. This self absorbed credentialed generation now has control over most of our institutions and continues to push the green fad. Reality is a cruel teacher and we are poised to learn a hard lesson. Reality always wins.

Nothing says you’ve jumped the shark like Attack Watch.com and it’s little sister the Twitter hashtag #attackwatch. The feed is a place for conservatives to vent or make sport of Obama. It’s still going strong. Here’s a favorite:
@duelittle Hey #attackwatch I heard the TSA was coming out with a similar website, it’s called AttackCrotch
Lions Gate Movies is running an ad at the top of the feed for the movie Warriors probably because of the feed’s demographics and the overwhelming popularity of the hashtag #attackwatch.
Let’s not let it die. If you have a Twitter account add #attackwatch to your tweets.

If you have a working familiarity with Strauss & Howe’s seminal work ‘Generations’ (1991) you’ll not find Mr. Simon’s analysis one bit surprising. The demographers (S&H) observed that a generation reaches its peak political power approximately when its first cohort reaches official retirement age.

For the Baby Boomers (and I’m a ’49er) the first year of our *cultural* generation is 1943, because nobody born after that point actually remembers World War II. If you add 65 years to 1943 you arrive at 2008.

Here I paraphrase S&H: After a generation arrives at its peak of power (2008), its fall from power is stunningly rapid and — to them especially — completely unexpected.

If I remember the census numbers correctly, Baby Boomers fall into *third* place as a generation (numerically) — behind Millennials and Xers — about 2013, depending upon how badly some of our members have abused the bodies that consequently quit on them between now and then.

Where it gets dangerous is that the last ‘Prophet’ generation to be so utterly divided against itself rallied around themselves, in their fading years, the forces of 1861 and beyond.

I’m still cool. I think the author conflates the fashionably cool with the real thing. Think Bogart, Steven McQueen, Bruce Willis, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne for hollywood variants. Or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy (does anyone truly believe Kennedy would be a democrat if he were alive today?) in the political realm. Cool is looking power in the eye when you know it is only trying to take advantage of you and saying “screw you”. Cool is righteous defiance, like the Tea Party. Now that liberalism is in power it is cool to be conservative and stand up to that power. But I’m cool standing up to ANY government or powerful private interests that are counter to my own. Real cool is being free. Wearing a Che shirt just means you’re a douche.

Cool is niether liberal or conservative. Cool is the outsider who speaks truths the predominata culture cannot understand and yets resonates with the youth, whose own life experience and communications skills are inadequate to express. Cool is the messenger but not the leader but it is never cool to be a follower.

Humans look for identity. We often say we are all unique but we are happiest when we can identify ourselves with what we do and how we think.

What is even more ironic is that the people we identify as cool are often locked up by thier own identities such as writer, poet, musician, artist or whatever. These labels come with internal definitions that have attached a complete manual on how to act, dress, and behave. The cool people are usually the ones that stretch or contract these definitions thus defining the new ordinary.

The real truth of cool is that once the new ordinary has been accepted what was once cool can never be again. Cool will always be the rebel, or outsider, who can see because of his isolation what the others cannot see. Cool is being so comfortable with yourself that external forces have little sway on your attitudes or actions.

Cool isn’t dead, it never will be, and you do not have to be young to be cool. The youth are attracted to cool because the youth want a leader and a template to attack the status quo. Cool is a lot like Jazz in that if I have to explain it to you, you will never get it.

Cool is one of the ultimate labels of identification, given by others and never self attached.

Rich,
“The real truth of cool is that once the new ordinary has been accepted , what was once cool can never be again”

Depends on your perspective…..Lady GaGa is very “cool” with certain circles, but she is essentially another Madonna…whatever mild differences that makes her “new” are embraced by the idiots who don’t know they’re being had, by a fad, that’s the same old sham.

The 20 year retro thing is pretty tired and silly once youre old enough to see the second or third one come around.

I thought the 50’s style Fonz, in tight blue jeans and white t-shirt was way-cool in the 70’s when I was a kid. When the ‘Nam revival of the 80’s hit the movies and TV screens, I was already in Uniform.

I am 54 years old, and I too felt some of the pressure to be part of the “cool” crowd, but I never went for it whole hog. I think, ironically, this is because I had a fairly low opinion of myself and never thought I would fool anyone into thinking I actually WAS cool. This allowed me to make my most profound break with my peers – in musical preferences. At 14 I started listening to classical music and never turned back. I couldn’t have cared less what other teenagers thought about it. Though I was definitely a liberal back then, I think I had just enough common sense to sense even then that the generation of the Counterculture thought far more highly of itself than it had any justification doing.

Not too long ago I was listening to a charming symphony by an 18th-century composer from what is now Belgium. His name was Pierre van Maldere (1729-1768). As I was listening to it I couldn’t help smiling a little at the thought that even as a teenager I would rather have listened to a newly recorded symphony by this obscure man than any new album by any of the rock groups who were then the rage. Not that I hated pop music; I didn’t. I thought it was OK some of the time. It just didn’t mean anything special to me, perhaps in part because I saw it as the product of a generation of people whose salient characteristic was its habit of wildly overrating itself.

Today few things are more depressing than having to listen to the same tired leftist drivel coming from some paunchy, greying, bespectacled relics of the 1960′s. They belong in a museum somewhere as archaeological exhibits, right next to the mummies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Physically these people have grown old. Emotionally and intellectually they never grew up. Sad for them, but even sadder for the country.

They belong in a museum somewhere as archaeological exhibits, right next to the mummies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Physically these people have grown old. Emotionally and intellectually they never grew up. Sad for them, but even sadder for the country.

I want to say something intentionally, positively uncool. At best, Cool can be an effortless grace, but those cats are born to it. For the rest of us, Cool — from Jazz through the Rat Pack and the Beats to the Hippies and, hell, even the cool kids in high school — depends on a cultivated insouciance, a self-conscious nonchalance, a studied apathy toward the world. That’s a difficult pose to maintain day in and day out, publicly and privately; real people are just not made that way. But the trick becomes easier with alcohol, nicotine and HTC. Alot of behavior we associate with Cool is actually people moving around and talking with a mild buzz.

Oh, another observation re sex, drugs and rock & roll. — Rock & Roll should not be cool, it should be loud, intense and fun. If it’s Cool, it ain’t Rock. — Cool may enhance the pursuit of sex. But sex itself can never be Cool. If it is, you’re doing it wrong. — Someone who dabbles in drugs seems Cool. But only booze and pot really induce the proper mellow. Most other drugs send you in other directions: weird, whacked out, twisted, frenzied, or wired. Definitely Not Cool. Incidentally, this is how Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love killed Cool.

Obama was not, is not and will never be Cool. He does display, at his best, a certain suavity and even elegance. But he’s always seemed a very tightly coiled character. If the effort at control and discipline bleed thru the apparent ease, well dude, that’s totally not Cool. His does regularly. And as the wheels have come off his bus, he’s exhibited some decidedly childish traits. And it there’s one thing that’s not Cool it’s being a brat.

For the rest of us, Cool — from Jazz through the Rat Pack and the Beats to the Hippies and, hell, even the cool kids in high school — depends on a cultivated insouciance, a self-conscious nonchalance, a studied apathy toward the world.

Still waters run deep—or not at all. For most of the “cool” who rely on the appearance of nonchalance, it’s the latter. The nonchalance is a simulation of the kind of detachment from emotional overreaction that comes from a deeper understanding of the circumstances at hand than others have. Most self-anointed cool ones have no such understanding, only the shallow outward appearance. It’s a mirage. Obama is the current shining example.

Well, all through my youth I avoided sex, because it wasn’t with “the One!” (And I don’t mean Obama; I mean the sole female I was focused on.) I never did drugs. No drugs. Never. As for rock ‘n’ roll: I was a Yes fan, so it wasn’t music to me unless it had a gong, kettle drums, several time-signature changes, and/or a killer keyboard solo.

I think “cool” is one of the major things that’s wrong with the world. I’m sick of drunkeness, tattoos and people who strike poses while they smoke. Motorcycles don’t impress me, and I roll my eyes at the guys who hang out by the time clock at work and yammer about basketball players with pomposity, as if they’re smarter than the team owners. “Cool” guys just seem to me like scared and unsure people; desperate to fit in.

Interesting thing: now that we’re all old and gray, I go to my high school reunions and the former cool kids now tell me how they always thought I had my sh*t together. They saw me as confident.

Cool is the substitution of a jaded mannerism for the cultivation and achievement of the moral virtues. It is the substitution of iconoclasm for creative beauty. It is the substitution of self-satisfied resentment for the pursuit of happiness. In each case cool is the easy, risk-free path on which success is certain, and its alternative the difficult path on which failure is a live possibility. Cool appeals to youth because it offers them an easy out at the early stage of the difficult path.

Cool is being comfortable in your own skin. Not acting like you are in someone else’s. As for sex and drugs and rock’n'roll, as P.J. O’Rourke says, that was a lot of fun. Until sex could kill you, drugs failed to thrill you and rock’n'roll began to suck. Can we say U2? I know you could.

When I was growing up, there were hippies and there were freaks. I fell into the later camp. We had a high level of disdain and ridicule for flower-toting, peace sign flashing hippie clones who only wanted to smoke pot and zone out. Freaks were into heavier music, were frenetically anti-government. It was a natural and smooth progression for me to ultimately become a tax-paying, productive libertarian. Only once and a while I miss the LSD…

Cool is herd behavior. This explains the modern turn toward pornography. No need to apologize anymore for what tradition called the solitary vice. It’s what’s happening now, man; everybody’s doing it! After polygamy is discovered to be a “right,” there is more road to travel. When bestiality is cool, the last of the taboos will lie in the dust. To those who say that goes too far, the multiculti reply is who are you to impose your values on other people? A last mountain must be climbed after that: guilt. That’s the moral voice we’re born with, the quiet one that insists there is a difference between right and wrong. Even wankers feel guilt afterward. Imagine the weight of guilt when you climb off sheep or sow. “But everybody’s doing it, man, and nobody’s hurt.” The little voice won’t buy it even if it’s all the rage in Ivy League schools where there are endowed chairs for its study.

In 2004,The author Rick Bass demolished the topic with his essay “Against Cool”. It appeared initially in the Genko Tree Review and was later highlighted in the Best American Essays of 2004(Hougton-Mifflin books). He says it all. I highly recommend to all of you who enjoy a good read and have an opinion about this topic: read the essay. It is spot on. Rick Bass is no fool; his thoughts on the subject should be considered part of the dialouge; it resonates with the original article by Roger Simon in interesting ways and speaks to almost all of the comments. I highly reccommend.

In high school, my best friend was Lester Bangs, who went on to become a legendary writer on rock and roll and the culture that accompanied it. He was smart and witty, and thoroughly versed the beats; Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs. He wrote about rock stars, hung out with them and cataloged the evolution of music from Miles Davis to Roland Kirk to the Stones to Iggy Pop. He also did drugs from Romilar to pot, acid, coke, to an endless wellspring of liquor. I looked up to him and followed his example. Until I couldn’t any longer. His way led to madness, sickness, poverty, and wretched god-awful music. He lived and died in squalor, and his life cured me of any desire to ever be “cool” again.

I was so un-cool I didn’t know what cool was–or maybe cool was Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip. It was the Age of Aquarius but I was reading Spider-man, Robert E Howard, Doc Savage, Philip K Dick and H P Lovecraft. I just didn’t get cool at all. Drugs were all but invisible in my world, too. I only knew about hashish from Clark Ashton Smith poetry.

But there’s a funny thing about cool. If you’re so uncool you’re off the reservation, sooner or later cool comes looking for you. Today comic books are cool. Fanboy geeks like the characters on The Big Bang Theory are cool. And the stuff I read growing up has become cool–Well, as cool as anything can be in this post-literate world. Pretty cool, huh?

Looking back – for me — cool is conforming to a current fashion of thought, dress and behaviors that are learned and reinforced through mass communication.

Only in retrospect do some people seem “cool” to me in another more important way – independent, creative, self-directed. At the time they likely appeared “weird”, truly marching to a different drummer, a bit of an outsider, not with it.

Secure in themselves versus fitting in with whatever is the flavor of the month.

Immanuel Goldstein, great comment! I think you’re cool despite yourself. For thoughts about what is or is not cool from “Lester Bangs,” here’s a link to dialogue from the greatest-ever rock movie: Almost Famous /www.imdb.com/title/tt0181875/quotes.

‘Cool’ originally meant something completely different than it does today. It was essentially bohemian, but different from the bohemianism before it. It originated in the late 1940s to describe ‘progressive’ jazz as opposed to ‘hot’ jazz. Cool was personified in the character of the hipster, somebody emotionally detached, uninvolved, a kind of ‘been there, done that’ attitude. In fact ‘cool’ was an attitude, not a conformity to a fad, though it became a fad for a while. Hipsters wore dark glasses indoors and took drugs to signify their detachment from the outside world. MJQ was ‘cool’ and so were the Beat Poets. ‘Beatnick’ was a word coined by Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. The hipsters and the beatniks were a-political–politics implied too much involvement in the world to be cool. The hippies of the 60s were not ‘cool’ in the original meaning of the world, just trendy and spaced-out. Spaced-out is not the same as ‘cool.’ As the word evolved it came to mean just ‘neat’ or cleaver or elegant, or novel, whatever you want it to mean. That’s the source of confusion that you see in these comments.

You are correct. I’m 79 and hindsight now has me remember the “cool” guys in High School in the late 1940′s as somehow trying not to reveal how unsure of themselves they were, while at the same time as having what we now call “attitude”. I doubt that any of them went on to college.

“Cool” was carefully and surreptitiously cultivated with sidelong glances towards others thought to be “cool”…..to be “cool” then in those Post War years was to be just the right ammount of “aloof”…to be role playing, but not to be thought of as role playing.

I hope fervently that this emerging Obama-shallow-charisma-empty-awareness will be a lesson to us all, in that the very concept of liberal “cool” is a vacuum….abhorred…..and soon to be filled by Conservatism.

I think modern, American cool was invented by black people. For them, cool was about grace under pressure. It was also about power. If you were relatively powerless and active rebellion could get you killed, you had to act detached. Unruffled. In control of your situation. Superior in and of yourself. And free – free from societal constraints, free from pressure, free from fear, free from the need to please…let’s face it…white people.

You might have been laid back, above it all. Or you might have been wild and crazy, acting like you didn’t care, setting new fashions. However you expressed your cool, it was all about being free and having control over yourself – not giving in, not participating in the system that oppressed you. It was a way of expressing contempt for that system. Rebellion without rebelling. It was all a pose, but it was the best you could do.

Hence it’s attraction for teenagers, who frequently need to rebel without rebelling. So little white children learned from the masters of cool and adopted their ways – detachment, cynicism, slang, dark glasses & black berets, be-bop jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, etc., etc. They even learned to fake a sense of oppression. No political or economic oppression for them, of course. No dogs and fire hoses. Just stupid old Mom & Dad and their stupid old society.

We all know it’s kind of pathetic, this faux suffering imitating authentic suffering. It’s what the counter culture of the 60s was all about. But what can we do? They’re rebels, and hence out of our control. And of course a lot of astute capitalists have always understood that there’s money to be made SELLING cool.

Because if you look at the individuals, the typical liberal hive member shows about the same experience in independent thought as the average worker bee. And due to atrophy from lack of use, maybe not much greater aptitude on teh rare occasions when they try.

Case in point of what the surrendering to the hive will do to you: Paul Krugman, who used to be a brilliant economist, just look at him now.

Cool is simply hedonism. “Be whatever you want to be ” is what cool was and still is. Spending money irresponsibly on personal gratification or public “entitlements” so you or they can be what you want to be – just like the rich – is cool. But the Social Democrats call it liberal, just as they call socialism “leftism”. And we go along with them.

Cool is still rampant. Kids still use the term. Obama is still cool. Hedonism, childish self-indulgence, spending money wastefully so everybody can be what they dream of is the philosophy and strategy of liberalism, Cool remains aggressively regressive. It is what we must put the brakes on in the coming election.

I began to be anti-cool when I saw how elitist the whole thing was and being a contrarian by nature–I was against the Beatles when they first came out cause they were just too popular. They won me over at our 7th grade dance when I noticed how incredible they were to dance to. They earned their coolness. My memories of hippie days are of the majority who were barely conscious, and the adult hippies keeping it together. Who fed the summer of love masses in the park. Who showed up at the first Rainbow Gathering with medical supplies and kept the food coming across the lake and up the trail. Who passed out hundreds of bottle of sun screen at stadium Dead shows and then picked up the garbage after. And who unfurled a giant Old Glory when the boys played US Blues. Cool is a cool does, elite is not cool. Sarah Palin is cool, as is her whole cotton pickin family.

I don’t know, the sixties were pretty cool. It hadn’t gone to poop yet. Families were still intact, you didn’t need answering machines, someone was always home. We had lots of freedom and really nothing to fear. It was innocent and fun.

Maybe it was FROM the 50′s, I don’t know, but the 60′ were good. The hippies were all about love and peace and dance and music. It was the kind of happy even grandma could enjoy – like watching a three year old dance around the room, acting silly and saying I love you. There was an uncomfortable wind of change in the air, and the drugs were beginning to make the scene, but we were young and occupied with our roller skates, and bikes with banana seats that had streamers on the hand grips.

But at some point, around the late sixites or early seventies, it got that feeling you get when you attend a party in a Holiday Inn or a church basement. It became like that reality show, I don’t know the name.. tots and tiaras…or whatever it is. The one with all the little JonBenet Ramseys going up to the stage. The peace, love and happiness dance became cheesy and kind of creepy around the edges. It all had a packaged and promoted feel to it, like some young corporate exec was herding you to get hyped up to attend the latest rock concert for a percentage of tickets sold.

And quite frankly, it was all pretty much downhill from there. The drugs, the young girls who got pregnant, divorced and left behind as their friends went off to college. The heroin, the acid, the whole psychadellic thing. The music became dark and gritty and the smell of pot was always wafting from somewhere hidden. The shiny tinsel of the peace love and happiness ornament was peeling and revealing a cheap plastic ornament that had no lasting value.

But the initial idea of love and peace was good, and for many, I’m sure that is what it was about. But in the end, it had none of the substance of the true peace, love and happiness that our western civilization were based on. It was just kind that winds up on the bumper sticker or tee shirt – meaningless and trite.

The sixties completely sucked. The only thing I miss about it are things about myself. I miss my teenage body, and I miss the feeling that everything I encountered was fresh new and exciting. And, that’s about it.

I sure don’t miss what was going on in the outside world. 300 or 400 American kids coming home from Vietnam in body bogs every single week is what was going on.

Screw that. The world ain’t perfect now, but, on balance, it’s better than it was then.

The end of cool? I suppose the end of cool happened when the Free Speech Movement New Left canceled free speech after they got in charge. For some hipsters the end of cool happened when they discovered evolutionary biology (and virus mutations) hadn’t stopped with free love and same-sex sex and died in droves. For LBJ the end of cool happened when he got blind sided by the New Left when he thought his political problems would come from the old right. For Obama the end of cool happened when he got blind sided by the right and the independents while pandering to his left. For Americans the end of cool happened when they were repeatedly reminded by the first black president that they were still racists after forty years in the wilderness.

And I despise the free loaders who talked of being “anti war” (ignoring the boat people) and “compassionate” (while I worked in poverty striken areas) and bragged about free love and drugs (while I treated those whose lives were destroyed by their parent’s hedonism).

I never cease getting disgusted at the “anti-war” left. They always look away from the millions of victims of communism and Islamic terrorism and focus on Tim McVey and that one man who killed the abortion doctor. They focus on gitmo and ignore the prison that IS the entire country of North Korea, as well as all of the other dark corners of the world. They talk about feminism and look away from the Acorn tape where they are willing to assist bringing 14 year old prostitutes into San Diego. Where are all of the anti-war protests now that Obama is in office? crickets chirp…

These people disgust me deeply. I don’t know how they manage to look in the mirror and think they are so much smarter than everyone else. They are hypocrites and fools. The era of smug superiority based on nothing but slogans is over.

I really don’t see how cool depended on liberalism as Simon pretends, any more than it depended on conservatism (hardly!). When one thinks authentic cool (to those of us over forty), somebody like Steve McQueen comes to mind, no cry-baby liberalism there. Kerouac and Cassady and the beats and their world could hardly said to be liberal *in the contemporary sense*. One can’t imagine their alter egos from ‘On the Road’, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty riffing deep into the night about the need for a nanny state, and how Islam is the RoP, even if such characters were transplanted into our century. If Kerouac were alive today he would, I bet on it, hate liberals. Liberals are distinctly uncool (as are conservatives). Their cool, cool itself grew out of the blues, the jazz scene, its sense of natural rhythm and its seamier side included. It wasn’t limited by that, but those are its roots and of course they are distinctly anti-establishment. Liberalism is hardly anti-establishment, then and now.

And when you are eighteen, of course you want to be cool. Cool means getting the girls without even trying, taking it as a given, pretending them a distraction, an irritation on occasion. The pretty girls chase the cool boy, he doesn’t even lift a finger, he takes it as his due. Sure he’s full of it, but that’s the cool posture. And who didn’t want this at eighteen, heck at twenty-five, thirty?

Cool was Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti Westerns, where the man with no name was about as liberal as Genghis Khan. Give me a break. Just because liberals easily confuse cool with liberalism (think Johnny Depp), doesn’t mean the two actually are conflated.

Just a correction, I wrote above:
“Liberals are distinctly uncool (as are conservatives). Their cool, cool itself grew out of the blues, the jazz scene, its sense of natural rhythm and its seamier side included”

I mean to write ‘cool itself grew out of..’, not *their cool*.

I might add, since when does cool have anything to do with moral and cultural relativism, the defining pathologies of liberalism? Even if one were to stretch cool to encompass debauchery and its destructiveness, think of all those rock stars and bluesmen dying from drink and drugs before thirty, what on earth does this have to do with moral relativism and a love affair with the RoP? And yes the latter has everything to do with liberalism (and neo-conservatism).

We can only hope. In my prep circle, Rubin and Hoffman were considered to be PT Barnum clones and bordeline morons. We were equally unmoved by “Greening of America” and “Catcher in the Rye.” Then off to Comm Ave with Howard Zinn. No one took him seriously. Ultimate cool and ultimate huckster.

All the cool hippie marxist kids in the 60′s looked alike, acted alike, and thought alike, and ostracised anybody who did not look, act, and think, like them. And the entire time they were talking about how they were all “independent thinkers”. Yes they were independent of their parents (at least as long as mom and dad continued to give them money to live their independent lifestyles), but in relation to each other they were a colectivist hive mind, espousing collectivist positions. The only real independent thinkers are libertarians, although even with them they sometimes start criticising each other for not being orthodox libertarian enough.

The only *real* independent thinkers are schizophrenics. That’s what’s weird about human “rebels.” We’re social creatures, even the most misanthropic of us. Very few of us can or will really isolate ourselves from society. We need validation. We need to watch other people to see if anyone else is doing what we’re doing. If they are, we’re ok. If they’re not, we can’t help feeling lonely and uncomfortable.

The person who tries to be “different” always does so by imitating other “different” people. He he can’t tell if he’s “different” unless someone else who is “different” is there to assure him that he is, in fact, “different.” Otherwise, how does he know he’s not just some freak?

The saddest thing, as you point out, is when all the “different” people get together, establish strict criteria for being “different,” and kick out anyone who tries to be “different” differently.

Ultimately, “cool” is a sly trick used by delta monkeys in their quest to become alpha monkeys. They don’t have the biggest muscles or the sharpest fangs, but they can pose a little pose or pout a little pout or stare a little stare or dance a little dance, somehow sending a thrill up other the monkeys’ legs. Nobody can explain why this is, although it may be due to the “cool” monkey not needing to beat the crap out of anyone to get what he wants. Ultimately, it’s just monkey brains doing what they do. That goes double for humans.

So next time you see some guy wearing cool shades or spouting the latest hip buzzwords, just think of him as the baboon with the shiniest butt.

OK, I’ll bite. Yes this administration is full of nerds who would have been considered the antithesis of cool a couple of decades back. That’s because nerd is in. Video games, hacking, now “cool” is knowing your way around a computer and the net. And the Obama administration is very different from the Clinton administration because it’s full of these 20-something know-nothing punks who can tweet stupid shiite, but haven’t got the common sense to breathe. When Clinton was president, “cool” was getting a blow job from a 20-something intern in the oval office. Obama’s “cool” is an emasculated, metrosexual version of Clinton’s unapologetically heterosexual honey badger cool. And that’s why he’s lost the confidence of the American people.

In a decade, we went from stains on a blue dress to golf 24/7. Sorry, the guy just isn’t a full-fledged testosterone-driven male, and neither are the people surrounding him. They’d all rather be eating arugula, and it shows.

I had this discussion with my wife last week where I told her with a certain air of mirth that I still consider myself a “hipster”. She laughed and said “No, you’re a grumpy old man”. True Dat! But let me relate a few of my cool points. In 1966, I saw Bob Dylan in early electric mode at Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo. In 1967, I took a double dose of Owsley Purple Flats acid on the night the last episode of “The Fugitive” was on (I know that because it was my reference point to get back to earth) In late 1968, I witnessed a guy named Al Straighter smoke a phat one behind a rice paddy dike on the Oriental River and jump up firing an M60 machine gun from the hip at a bunker complex. In 1973 I drugged myself mad and did the rehab circuit for a couple years…there’s a lot of other stupid stuff in my cool portfolio, but seriously I consider myself cool today because I met the King of Cool if I might call him that in 1978. I’m talking about meeting the Christ of the New Testament, the one who stood on a hill in Palestine in about 30 AD and offered up the most revolutionary manifesto ever, The Sermon on the Mount.
Christ didn’t make me a Chamber of Commerce guy in a polyester suit and He sure exposed the bankruptcy of Marxists and tyrants. He made me a true hipster, an iconoclast tearing down the phony altars to Baal in this sick, twisted culture. Today, I shared a little of my story with a bunch of gaunt hollow-eyed crack heads at a low rent rehab in Mexico. That was like way cool!

The baby blunder generation has been the worst generation in our history. Sandwiched between two of the greatest generations. But we’ll fix your mess. Go have another doobie. My fix for social security and Medicare would be to give zero benefits to those between the ages of 55-66. Save the money for those responsible Americans who don’t squander our country’s liberty, traditions, and resources. And if you weren’t a nasty hippie revolutionary, then you failed by being weak, silent and allowing the counter culture to damage our nation. 70′s hippie counter culture. 80′s yuppie selfish “me” generation. 90′s greed, corruption, corporate raider thieves and ponzi-schemers. 2000′s corrupt political class sell-outs, anti-constitution, politically correct jackasses. You have been the grasshoppers in an ant world. (that’s one of Aesop’s Fables for you acid dropping mind expanding folk) Can’t wait till this last hoorah with your last ditch Obama communist revolution gasp is over and you’re all gone. Being Cool? Seriously? That’s your walk down memory lane here? thanks for the mess you’re leaving, now FOAD. Ok, I feel better now.

Nice screed there Buddy. I don’t get the “sandwiched between two of the greatest generations” My dad’s generation was great. They beat Hitler. What exactly did the generation after the boomers do to make them so great? Invent video games and being slackers? Master the fine art of mortgage derivatives? Champion gay marriage? Elect Obama? I’ll admit my generation loosed the snakes in Medusa’s box. But please enlighten me O most noble American what your great generation has accomplished.

Another product of the self-esteeem mania. Don’t worry child, you’ll still have to work for us for a decade or two; no corner office or pretty secretary for you for awhile. Too bad you’re so resentful, makes you an ugly person.

I cannot figure if I ever was cool or not. I read both Kerouac and Hayek, Rand, et al in my youth,declared myself atheist in my Jesuit High School. Did the hippie-beat thing, riding rails, hitchiking, communes, hanging out in S. America. Sold the best pscilocybin-thai weed mixture at UT…and always was a libertarian-rightwinger who despised the radical socialist student movements. Then I got religion, became a Christian but was STILL a libertarian rightwinger and have been since the 70′s when I was a teen. Am I nuts or was the rest of the world nuts?

It seems to me that Roger did get it to a point. But he didn’t get that being cool also mean that you help define what is cool. You bring new stuff yourself as well. You are both inspired by others and you inspire others yourself. It’s basically about being at forefront for what will be mainstream tomorrow. So Roger was probably just behind the curve. Still it motivated him to become skilled in his profession. So it did serve a purpose towards a positive outcome. And PJM is definitely cool. Yet it seams to me that he still partly suffers from a judgemental attitude and lack of openness and courage that one needs to possess to be part of defining what is cool. Like the people that buys Apple gadgets to show how cool they are. Yet they bring nothing to the party themselves. Therefore they are not cool, merely elitist.

Cool will never die. And writing that’s it dead or decomposing, well that’s just another attempt at being cool, yes? Cool is all about the something else in life, something different and unusual and rare and strange and hard to find. And once it’s there, once other people can see it, they copy what they think they see because that’s part of cool, having imitators and emulators. Not that cool cares about any of that, it doesn’t, it doesn’t care about who wants to come along for the ride, those who were present at the creation or those who come along later and call it retro or vintage or throw back. Cool is cool. It has always been and will always be. It can never die. Adam stood in the Garden of Eden and when God made Eve, the man said, Cool. That’s really cool.

Where I grew up I never knew what conservatism was. Everybody just said they were liberal. There was one guy in high school who was a conservative, so I asked him to tell me about it and he wouldn’t because he thought I just wanted to be cool.